The hottest day in Melrose

July 4th, 1911 was the hottest day in the history of the Boston area, reaching 104 degrees. Most communities reported the quietest Fourth of July celebrations in memory. Melrose, in contrast, had a party that lasted almost 24 hours and involved over 10,000 people.

By the late 19th century, the modern celebration of the Fourth of July had taken shape, and featured ostentatious displays of patriotism, much eating and drinking, and backyard incendiaries. It had become such a day of excess that in 1911 Massachusetts even adopted the slogan “A Safe and Sane Fourth” to encourage responsible behavior.

In Melrose, backers of a new Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Building had used Fourth fervor to mount a referendum on July 1st to fund a new “arena.” The city’s lone movie theater, located in City Hall, staged a day of patriotic films and music to encourage “yes” votes. The referendum passed easily, clearing the way for the construction of Memorial Hall.

The Fourth festivities began on the night of the third, with the playing of a two-hour concert of patriotic songs by a military band at the Common, followed by the traditional midnight lighting of the community bonfire. The fire station across the street meant that there were hoses at the ready to douse any errant embers. The Melrose Free Press reported that afterwards “everyone went home, but not to sleep. It was too hot.”

The next morning the parade began on West Wyoming at 9:45, featuring hundreds of marchers, from the solemn (the remaining Civil War veterans) to the silly (a “horribles” parade featuring cowboys, a hobo band, fake policemen, and “Mr. and Mrs. Isaac Cohen as real Hebrews.”) The march traveled from Wyoming to Main to Lynde to Malvern to Lebanon to Green to Franklin to Vinton to West Foster, a long slog in stifling heat. Thousands of people lined the route.

At 1 PM there was a children’s concert at City Hall, and each child received an American flag. At 3 PM, in the worst heat of the day, the Melrose High School baseball team, featuring their star pitcher, Ralph Cram, played a game at Pine Banks against Waltham. They lost the game, but each player received a baseball-shaped watch fob.

In the evening there was another band concert and dancing at Ell Pond, ending with a grand fireworks display.

The Melrose Free Press concluded the next week that the festivities “can surely be considered an illustration of a Safe and Sane Fourth,” and “that there were no fires, no casualties, and no persons arrested for intoxication reflects to the glory of Melrose.” Most miraculously, although there were reports of people from other communities being rushed to Melrose Hospital for heat-related illnesses, it seems not a single Melrosian got sick from the heat on that day.

America’s Most Typical Boy-Dog Pair

For a few short days in 1931, 13-year-old Laurence Orne of 26 Harrison Street was the most famous Melrosian in the world. He met President Hoover at the White House, addressed the nation from New York City during the New Year’s Eve broadcast, and had his picture plastered over newspapers across the United States. The reason for this adulation? He and his dog, Paugus, had earned the distinction of being named the winners of the “America’s Most Typical Boy-Dog Pair” competition.

The contest had received over 6000 submissions. Laurence had the advantage of an excellent photographer. His father, Harold I. Orne, was a mountaineer and member of the Appalachian Mountain Club who was known for his stunning nature photos taken high in the White Mountains.

Paugus himself was a boon. In the early 20th century, Americans had become obsessed with the idea of purebred dogs, and Paugus boasted a genealogy. A Husky, one of his grandfathers had been Chinook, the lead sled dog on Richard Byrd’s Antarctic expedition, who in turn had been a great-grandson of one of the sled dogs on Robert Peary’s Arctic expeditions.

If anything, this lineage made Paugus rather atypical, but that was no doubt part of the attraction for the Chappell Foundation, the organization that sponsored the contest and that also funded research into dog genetics. Could there have been a similar factor at play in their selection of Laurence as the “typical” boy?

Winners at the state level were handed over to a committee of five to decide the national winner. The chair of that committee was Senator James J. Davis of Pennsylvania. Davis was an outspoken believer in eugenics who had written that the time had come to distinguish between “bad stock and good stock, weak blood and strong blood, sound heredity and sickly human stuff.” Davis put his beliefs to work as the nation’s leading advocate of immigration restrictions.

When Davis looked at Laurence’s photo and saw his fair skin and hair, can there be any doubt that he saw what he thought should be the “typical” American boy?

Laurence Orne died in 1992. Paugus died long before that, and is buried at Proctor Animal Cemetery in Nashua.

Towers Plaza

After years of planning, Towers Shopping Plaza was finally ready for its grand opening on June 25, 1965. The owners and the tenants wanted opening day to go off with a bang—and it did, but not in the way they had hoped. At 4:30 AM, the shopping plaza was rocked by one of the largest explosions in Melrose history.

 

Towers Plaza had been the dream of Melrose developer Joseph G. Sawtelle. It was the second phase of a two-part revitalization plan for the area bounded by Albion, Melrose, Main, and the Parkway. The first phase had been the construction of the Melrose Towers, a 159-unit condominium development that to this day is one of the largest residential projects ever executed in the city. The second phase would be the retail space of Towers Plaza. Both the name and the three-pronged clock tower at its southeast corner were an homage to the adjacent residential towers. The plaza would replace an existing First National grocery store and create new space for it and six other shops.

 

All that went up in smoke just before dawn on the 25th. Had the blast occurred just a few hours later, dozens of people might have been killed. There were no deaths or injuries reported, but the sound of the explosion could be heard up to six miles away, and it frightened much of the city awake. Windows in neighboring buildings were shattered, and debris fell across the city from the 5 & 10 cent store, which had been at the center of the explosion. At this time of heightened Cold War tensions, some even thought the city might be under attack.

 

Two months after the blast, an investigation revealed that the explosion had been caused by an improperly installed gas line. Sawtelle rebuilt, and the plaza we know today occupies the same footprint. In fact, while businesses have come and gone, you can still find a grocery store, an ice cream parlor, a pharmacy, and a barber shop, just as on opening day in 1965. Anton’s Cleaners, one of the original tenants, survived opening day and is still in the building, proving that no matter what else changes, dry-cleaning will always be with us.

Ashton L. Carr

There is no other address in Melrose like 56 Larchmont Road, a house of such opulence that it seems like it fell out of the pages of The Great Gatsby. This was the home of Ashton L. Carr, who tragically never had much of a chance to enjoy it.

Carr had been born in 1876 at 39 West Emerson Street. When he was six years old, his father, George, who worked as a bank clerk, ran down West Emerson one morning to catch the train, only to suffer a fatal heart attack upon boarding. He was 43.

Raised by his mother, Martha, Carr graduated from Melrose High School in 1894 and then matriculated at Harvard, graduating in 1898. Like his father before him, he went into banking, working at the State Street Trust Company. He was soon promoted to vice-president. In 1900, he married Clara Vossnach, a nurse at the Melrose Hospital, where he served as a trustee. They lived at 152 Upham Street and had a son, George.

In 1911, Carr was named one of three trustees of the Fenway Realty Trust, and in that role was the person chiefly responsible for financing the construction of Fenway Park; you can see him on the bottom left of the photo from Fenway’s opening day.

In 1924, Carr with two other partners founded the Massachusetts Investors Trust, and in so doing changed finance forever, for this was the first mutual fund in American history. Today known as MFS, the company Carr founded 97 years ago is now worth a half-trillion dollars.

Carr used his earnings to have 58 Larchmont built from 1928 to 1929. It featured a two and one-half story library, long since repurposed, which Carr used to house his extensive collection of rare books and manuscripts. No doubt he looked forward to many long years in his glorious new home.

Carr’s investments survived the crash of 1929, and he and Clara took a European vacation in the winter of 1931. Upon returning, he developed an illness in his mouth that spread through his body and killed him at age 55.

Not long after his death, Clara was forced to sell both the house and all of the books in the library. She and George moved into a modest house in Malden. George died at age 48.

Melrose Spotlight: the Tudor Revival style

“Tudor Revival” is an architectural misnomer. It is a hodgepodge of aesthetic elements borrowed from English building styles ranging from the Middle Ages to the Jacobean era, featuring a combination of brick and stucco, often adorned with half-timbers and diamond-paned casement windows. If you look at a house and the words “Ye Olde” come to mind, chances are that you are looking at Tudor Revival construction.

In Melrose the style is mainly limited to one neighborhood, and that is the area just west of Bellevue Country Club. Several of these streets were built up in the 1930s by Melrose contractor Chester S. Patten, who gave his development the evocative name of “Moorlands,” itself reminiscent of an English period drama.

Patten worked with several architects, but his favorite partner was Royal Barry Wills. Wills designed the delightfully fanciful 26 Marmion Road, featuring a stucco second story with extensive half-timbering. Both the glass in the casement windows and the tiles of the slate roof have been deliberately discolored to give the house an artificially antique look. Vergeboards and finials on the two decorative gables give the house a Gothic flair.

Around the corner at 109 Country Club Road, Wills designed a Tudor where the half-timbering was far more restrained, acting as a border between the red brick of the façade and the multi-colored light greys of the overhanging slate roof. The chimney pots and the rough boarding in the dormers give the house rusticated touches, but its appearance altogether is unquestionably modern.

In contrast, our final Wills design, 90 Larchmont Road, looks convincingly like a Tudor cottage transported to America, from its massive central chimney stack to the artfully misshapen clapboarding on its gable ends. Wills placed the garage behind the mass of the house, hiding all signs of technology from casual passersby on Larchmont.

At the time when these houses were built, American capitalism seemed on the brink of collapse, and the world was teetering towards war. For those who could afford it, a Tudor Revival house offered an architectural escape to a peaceful, pastoral past—but with all of the modern conveniences.

Maj. Wesley Furlong

Juneteenth is a new holiday for most people in Melrose and for much of the northern United States. Yet over a century ago, one of the most important celebrations in the calendar of Black Boston was a similar commemoration of the end of enslavement, the anniversary of the reading of the Emancipation Proclamation, observed each January 1st. The chief organizer of those festivities for many years was Major Wesley Furlong of 47 Sanford Street.

 

This event was personal for him. He had been born into slavery in West Virginia, escaped north, and then in 1863 enlisted in the Massachusetts 54th Volunteer Regiment, returning to the South to risk his life to liberate his brethren. After returning from the war, he became an organizer of the annual August 1st exercises in New Bedford, which commemorated the end of slavery in the British Caribbean—a holiday New Bedford’s Black community had adopted in the days when they could only aspire to the end of slavery in the United States.

 

Furlong moved to Melrose in 1891. Years before, he had been one of the founders of the Robert Gould Shaw Veterans Association, the 54th Regiment alumni unit. Throughout his nearly 30 years in Melrose, he served as their commanding officer, and it fell to him to organize the annual Emancipation Day parade and exercises. He also frequently served as a featured orator. He spoke at the Emancipation Day ball in 1899, saying:

“On this day 36 years ago, I went to the front. I was then and only then ready to go, for my people had been declared a free and independent race with the rights of citizenship. I went for my race, for my country, and for my God.  As the day is dear to me, so it is to all of us, and we, as an organization, determine, as long as we live, to keep this day before our people, and when we no longer care to do this, we should die.”

 

A little over a year ago it was suggested that the Beebe School, soon to be reopened, be renamed in honor of Major Furlong, a genuine hero who lived in the neighborhood and sent his children to the Gooch School, the direct institutional predecessor of the Beebe School. We repeat that call now. It could be accomplished by next Juneteenth.

Focus on Melrose: Hasselbrack & Tasker

This was the photo that launched a thousand conversations in Melrose on February 2, 2000. It is reproduced here in the best quality available, which is a digital photo from a microfilm reader—our apologies for the poor definition.

What you see is the announcement of a commitment ceremony between Judy Hasselbrack and Mary Ann Tasker, two women who graduated from Melrose High School in 1990 and returned to live in the city that had nurtured them, residing at that time at 18 Hillside Park. What Dan McAlpine, the editor the Melrose Free Press, might not have known when he decided to publish the photo was that this was the first visual depiction of same-sex love ever printed by a newspaper in Melrose.

He soon found out. In this era just before the rise of social media, the best way to publicly express your feelings was through a letter to the editor, and the Free Press published an overwhelming number of letters about this photo for almost three months straight, before finally declaring a moratorium.

There were a couple of rather negative letters. There were many more letters of support, including statements from the Melrose Human Rights Commission, the Unitarian-Universalist Church, and the advisors of Melrose High School’s nascent gay-straight alliance.

Tasker told the Boston Globe’s Eileen McNamara “we hope it opens a dialogue in every household in Melrose.” It worked. By bursting open their own closet doors, they made it possible for other gay people in Melrose to allow a crack of light into their own darkness.

Some weeks into the controversy, the couple wrote a letter to the Free Press, telling the people of Melrose, “We thank you for the support you have shown us, our families, and to other gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender residents. Their future is one of hope.”

They were not wrong. That future Melrose is here, as evidenced by the Melrose Pride festivities this year. It is a world that Judy Hasselbrack and Mary Ann Tasker helped create. Every young LGBTQIA+ Melrosian who in 2021 can come out and express their authentic selves should thank them for the leap of faith in this community they made over twenty years ago.

Melrose Spotlight: Boston Rock Road

By the middle of the 20th century, much of Melrose had been built up. Yet the years of the baby boom put new pressures on the city. All around town, developers bought properties which had earlier been considered hopelessly far-flung or impossible to build upon. In 1952, permission was granted to develop the one remaining unprotected wild part of Melrose that lay just off of Main Street, Boston Rock.  It would soon become a showcase for some of the great American postwar architectural styles, the ranch, the split-level ranch, and the garrison colonial—usually with attached garage.

Number 135 Boston Rock Road is a garrison colonial of the type that had been built for decades. The key difference from those earlier models was the inclusion of the two-car garage within the structure of the house. Moving down the street, number 121 is also a garrison colonial, yet the architect opted for the modern, split-level design, with three floors of living space. The reason why is simple enough: like many Boston Rock houses, the property backs onto a steep drop-off, and the split-level model allowed the architect to build to the contours of the slope.

Number 45, on the other side of the hill, is a split-level ranch, featuring a projecting shallow gable over the two-car garage. It likewise backs onto a steep hill, and may be one of the houses that was sold as an “embankment ranch,” so-called because of its position on the slope. Number 42, across the street, does not face a cliff, and was instead built as a single-level traditional ranch.

Although houses like these are sometimes derided as boring or derivative, in many ways they took their philosophy from Modernism, creating homes based on standard plans, made with mass-produced materials, and responsive to the needs of the young families who moved into them. Here were modern houses that GIs returning from the front could afford to buy.

The sad postscript is that not all Americans could move into these homes, as Black veterans were denied GI bill benefits and federally-backed mortgage loans. Melrose gained 6,000 new residents between 1950 and 1970; the total Black population topped out at 68.  

Bowden Park

A follower wrote to us with the following query: “We stopped at Bowden Park this morning, and my daughter asked, reasonably I thought, why the park has the one name and the train station the other (Cedar Park).” This is indeed a reasonable question, and here is your answer.

When the station now called Melrose Cedar Park was opened in 1850, it was called Melrose Depot. Later it was simply called “Melrose.” In 1978, the MBTA renamed it to distinguish it from the other two Melrose stations.

“Cedar Park” does not refer to an actual park. It refers to an early suburban development called Cedar Park that was laid out in 1851 and comprises the streets of North and South Cedar Park. Sometime in the 20^th century, city planners began to refer to the entire surrounding neighborhood as Cedar Park, which led to the MBTA taking the name.

The parcel that is today Bowden Park was purchased in 1854 by Daniel W. Gooch, whose house was perched on the hill overlooking the land. The Gooch family owned the plot for the next 66 years, and even though it was perfectly sited for residential or industrial use, they never developed it. The reason was probably quite simple: they looked out at this land from their front window, and they did not want their view spoiled. Gooch was also a congressman, and would use the land as overflow space for large political gatherings.

In 1920 the Gooch family was finally ready to sell, and at that moment their neighbor at 56 Vinton Street, Frederick P. Bowden, purchased it. Bowden was one of Melrose’s wealthiest citizens and most generous benefactors, having made a fortune from his family’s medical supply business. He paid for the land outright, and in January of 1921 gave it to Melrose with the stipulation that “no buildings shall ever be erected on said land and that it shall be kept open forever for the benefit of the people of Melrose.” The city began calling it Bowden Park. Bowden died in 1933.

A wall is now being built in the park, and we can only hope that it does not morph into a building, and thus fall afoul of Bowden’s deed restriction.